GRI 2: General Disclosures - the 30 disclosures every reporter must publish
Structure of GRI 2
GRI 2: General Disclosures (2021) contains 30 disclosures in five blocks. Questions frequently ask you to place a disclosure in the correct block.
- 2-1 to 2-5 - organizational details and reporting practices: legal name, entities included in sustainability reporting, reporting period/frequency/contact, restatements of information, external assurance.
- 2-6 to 2-8 - activities and workers: activities, value chain and other business relationships (2-6); employees (2-7); workers who are not employees (2-8).
- 2-9 to 2-21 - governance: structure and composition, nomination and selection, chair, oversight of impact management, delegation, executive role, conflicts of interest, communication of critical concerns, collective knowledge, performance evaluation, remuneration policies and process, and the annual total compensation ratio.
- 2-22 to 2-28 - strategy, policies and practices: sustainable development strategy, policy commitments, embedding policy commitments, remediation processes, stakeholder engagement mechanisms (2-25 to 2-28).
- 2-29 to 2-30 - stakeholder engagement and collective bargaining.
Traps
2-7 versus 2-8: employees and non-employee workers are separate disclosures, and 2-7 must state whether the number is a headcount or full-time equivalent, broken down by gender and region. 2-21 is the ratio of the highest-paid individual's total annual compensation to the median employee's total annual compensation, reported with contextual information. 2-30 is the percentage of employees covered by collective bargaining agreements, often reported by region. 2-4 exists so that restated figures are flagged, not silently corrected.
Worked example: a report states "we employ 40,000 people worldwide". That does not satisfy 2-7 - the basis (headcount or FTE), the gender split and the regional breakdown are missing.